The Treaty of Portsmouth (Portsmouth Peace Treaty)

Portsmouth and the Peace Conference

In July 1905 Clark learned from Mrs. Helen C. Knight, his former Sunday school teacher, still in Portsmouth, that the peace conference between Russia and Japan would be held there. Mrs. Knight was the recipient of Clark’s earliest letters from Japan and in 1873 scattered them as stories throughout The Child’s Paper, a New York religious monthly published by the American Tract Society that she served as long-distance editor for nearly 45 years while living in Portsmouth. She also may have been the person who recommended that the Society publish Clark’s memoir of Japan in 1877.

The 1870 U.S. Census for Portsmouth lists not only the widowed Mrs. Knight at her Islington Street home, but Edward’s oldest brother, the Rev. Rufus W. Clark (then Rector of St. John’s Episcopal Church) as her boarder. Clark also ended his first “Round the World” trip back from Japan in 1875 at Portsmouth. On August 2nd 1905 he wrote to Griff, “I expect to go to Portsmouth next week. Are you coming? . . . I could meet you in my old birthplace. I gave an address on ‘Japan’ in the old North Church (Congl.), Father’s old church, in Portsmouth last Fall which was well received.” He gave what the newspaper called “a deeply interesting address on Japan” there on October 30, 1904.

Initially he planned to take his “War Pictures” there for a lecture the next year. “I have written Mrs. Knight to get the church for me one or two nights during the convention,” he told Griff, “But my effort at the Conference will still be for the Benefit of the Orphan Relief Fund.” As it turned out, he did not bring the War Lectures to Portsmouth. He wrote Griff, “It would have appeared too partial & of ‘favoritism’ while the Russians (with whom I greatly sympathize) are on neutral territory.”

A few days later he wrote, “I am stopping with my dear old friend Mrs. H. C. Knight, who is 91 years old.” In fact he arrived at Mrs. Knight’s a day or more before the peace delegates arrived, for he wrote that he “saw Komura as he came up in the launch from the [USS] Mayflower” on August 8th. He “recognized him immediately” as Komura’s carriage passed by in the parade through the City’s streets that welcomed the delegates, but told Griffis, he had “changed much in appearance since I used to see him daily in the class.” Clark also said that he photographed Komura that first day “as he entered the Court House at Portsmouth with Takihira,” another of Clark’s students (photo of Komura and Takahira entering the courthouse, above).

A Rockford, Illinois newspaper reported the Portsmouth activities of its former resident, telling its readers, “Clark Taught Baron Komura . . . Peace Envoy then a Lad.” The paper quoted Clark at length about services in Christ Church with the Russian delegation on August 13: “I was very much interested in the Russian party Sunday morning, because the Episcopal service is very different from the Greek church which the Russians attend.” Witte seemed to feel “his party was about to be surrounded when the suppliced choir came in and I noticed he watched closely while Baron Rosen never turned his eyes from the altar.” The collection was “something new for them,” too, “and sitting in the front pews was a little embarrassing for several members of the party.”

The next day Clark was awaiting the arrival in Boston of Methodist minister “Mr. Y. Honda, Bishop Harris’ assistant” in Tokyo who had been to an international YMCA Conference in Paris. Clark said it was Honda “who wrote the original letter of appeal sent out from Mr. Buck’s office” and had written that he had some money for the cause. “I want him to join me in asking an accounting of all the Funds” Clark said, hoping that if Honda could get the district attorney to indict Buck, all expense would fall to the State of New York.

Arriving from Paris, Rev. Honda must have taken the train directly to Portsmouth, for later that week Mrs. Knight hosted her houseguest, Clark, and two Japanese visitors, the Rev. Y. Honda and Yasujiro Ishikawa, editor of the Hochi Shimbun, for supper. She served expensive Japanese tea that had been sent from Shidzuoka as a present from Clark (nearly 30 years before) that she still had on hand. The local newspaper reported that “This ‘Shidzuoka tea’ was served in Japanese style, from a Japanese teapot and the Tokio guests pronounced it the genuine article, having lost but little of its flavor by being kept a full generation in a Portsmouth climate.” While reported merely as a pleasant “tea party” this may actually have been more of a strategy session for the relief funds and the message of the peace conference.

On Sunday evening, August 20, Rev. Mr. Honda spoke at the Methodist Church on State Street and “recapitulated the work of the Christian Missions” in Japan, ending with “a graphic account of the welcome work of the Y.M.C.A in the armies of Manchuria, the free tents and reading rooms of which the soldiers call the ‘Mother of the Army’.”

That same Sunday, Minister Takihira and Mr. Sato attended the services at the Christ Episcopal. At the conclusion of the service, on the steps of Christ Church, Clark greeted Minister Takahira. As they shook hands “for the first time in 27 years,” Clark asked Takahira “if he remembered when he was his student” at the Imperial University in Tokyo. Takihira “replied in the affirmative,”

Clark said authoritatively that after the conference was done Komura would be made a Count and Takahira a Baron for their service.

That week Griffis essay, “First Envoy to Japan,” that had been published in the New York Times before the conference, appeared in the Portsmouth Herald. He reminded readers that in 1832 Portsmouth resident Edmund Roberts was the first diplomat America sent to Japan. Unfortunately Roberts died in China before presenting his credentials, but he was memorialized in Portsmouth in the first stained glass window added to St. John’s Episcopal Church in 1885 by a bequest of Mrs. Mary Pruyn of Albany, NY.

This Mrs. Pruyn, author of Grandmother’s Letters from Japan in 1877 was a widowed member of Roberts’ father’s Albany Dutch Reform Church and ran the American Mission Home in Yokohama (below). She acted like a mother to the young Professor Clark, who photographed her in front of the Japanese mission and described her in his Life and Adventures in Japan.

While Griffis predicted “the Japanese envoys will doubtless visit St. John’s Church, so rich in Oriental mementos, to look upon the noble stained glass window in memory of this first ambassador accredited to Japan,” it was the Russians who actually did so.

The local Herald reported that on Sunday, August 27, Clark, whom they described as the “brother of Rev. Rufus W. Clarke, former rector of St. John’s Church, now a professor in the University of Japan” officiated at St. John’s Church. As Clark reported to Griff “ I preached in the old St. John's Church, Portsmouth (with the Russians in front of me) & your old stained glass window friend ('Edmund Roberts!) looking at me sideways from the window.”

By then the delegates were locked in a battle between their own judgment and the instructions of their government, and formal negotiations had stalled. During this critical moment the US State Department representative in Portsmouth, Third Assistant Secretary Herbert Pierce and his wife encouraged friends to entertain both delegations until efforts to revive negotiations could bear fruit.

On August 28th, the Japanese government decided that, since the key problems relating to Manchuria and Korea –the Japanese objectives of the war -- had already been settled to Japan’s advantage, it was absolutely necessary to make peace even if it meant renouncing the two major claims for financial reparations and the ceding of Sakhalin Island to Russia.

Clark went out to the Wentworth Hotel in New Castle that day to speak with the Japanese delegates. “Komura looked pale and thin, but grim & determined, as if a breath would blow him away,” he reported. “The Japs were in a panic that fatal afternoon, when the order came from Tokio to 'make peace' on any terms. The Japs cried! & I sat by Ishikawa as he wrote a 6-page letter to Baron Komura (upstairs at the Wentworth) begging him to 'resign' --rather than 'capitulate'!”

Peace was declared on August 29th. By September 4, when negotiations had been concluded “Komura was very genial the night of the final Japanese reception when I introduced a lot of beautiful ladies to him. ”Clark later told Griff that Baron Komura, who “remembered you very well, … added with a funny smile, 'Mr. Clark taught us inorganic chemistry, & electricity' and 'Mr. Griffis taught organic chemistry & LAW,' & then he laughed outright at the queer mixture of subjects!!"

Next: Clark and the Japanese at Green Acre